Many words have been written about the closure of the News of the World, the effect on many journalists, and the loss of its self-proclaimed public service in exposing "scandal" (Report, 11 July). It reminded me of the 60s, when Arnold Weinstock used his individual power to close one of the world's most advanced electronics manufacturing companies, with disastrous effect on the industry.

These individuals only have this power because successive governments have supported them as "modernisers", and the media has promoted them as free marketeers. We need to ask why the free market requires unions to ballot members before they can disrupt the public for a day of strike action, while their employers can disrupt the public for years by closing an operation, be it a newspaper, a factory, or a care home, virtually overnight. If we believe in the free market, then all actors in that market must be equally free.

Owen Ephraim

Chelmsford, Essex

• Martin Kettle (Comment, 8 July) says "media barons of the 21st century are the trade union barons of the mid-20th, holdouts against the rule of law and fairness". Whatever else they might be accused of, union leaders believed in the rule of law. There is no equivalence between today's owners of the fourth estate (the press) and the leaders of the erstwhile fifth estate (the unions).

Dr Dave Lyddon

Keele University

• Geoffrey Robertson calls for an urgent public inquiry into the behaviour of our tabloid press and suggests the recently retired judge, Lord Hoffmann, as a possible chair (A newspaper is gone, 8 July). I hope not. Lawyers in general, and Lord Hoffmann in particular, do not have a happy record when trying to grapple with the ethics of journalism.

In 1989 a young journalist called Bill Goodwin was hauled into the high court where the then Mr Justice Hoffmann ordered him to name his source for a story he had written about the financial problems of a computer company. Mr Goodwin politely refused to do so, explaining that journalists have an ethical duty – and the right under the 1981 Contempt of Court Act – to protect the identity of their sources. The case went from high court to appeal court and eventually the House of Lords. At every stage, the judges put the interests of a commercial company ahead of the journalist's ethical duty. Mr Goodwin was sent back to the high court, where Mr Justice Hoffman fined him £5,000.

Happily, in 1996, the European court of human rights found, on appeal, that Hoffman and a slew of other judges were wrong and that Mr Goodwin was entitled to protect his sources. Geoffrey Robertson will recall the case, since he was Mr Goodwin's barrister in Strasbourg.

Jacob Ecclestone

Diss, Norfolk

• The government claims that there is a toxic "compensation culture", fuelled by "no win no fee" cases (Report, 30 March). It should be noted that the bringing to account of sections of the press and police over phone hacking has been achieved by a combination of investigative journalism and civil cases. These hard-fought cases have forced reluctant defendants to disgorge documentary evidence which has exposed wrongdoing. These cases will have been mainly funded on a "no win no fee" basis.

Professor John Peysner

University of Lincoln

• You say ( Media, 11 July) that Ofcom is not truly independent of government and is waiting to take over press regulation from the PCC. In fact, Ofcom is accountable to parliament and independent of government. CEO Ed Richards was appointed by the independent non-executive directors of the Ofcom board, and not the Department for Culture Media and Sport. And while we have a legal duty to be satisfied that broadcast licence-holders are "fit and proper" and we are contacting the relevant authorities investigating hacking claims, we have no responsibilities for press regulation and we are concentrating only on our job in hand.

Clayton Hirst

Director of communications, Ofcom

• We have been repeatedly warned that foreign powers are trying to hack into our key institutions. The allegations that News International successfully hacked into Gordon Brown's personal data (Report, 12 July) represents just such a breach of national security. I therefore assume the security services were employed to identify the perpetrators. And if not, why not?